Everyday Book Marketing

Cat Editors: Lori Ostlund and Prakash & Oscar

By Midge Raymond,13th January 2016

The boys came to us from the Goathouse Refuge, a cat shelter located in the forest outside of Chapel Hill, NC, where we were living for two years while I was the visiting writer at UNC. Prakash, the white boy with pink ears, has kept a careful distance when we work. In the photo below, he can be seen doing what he does: observing as I type. He isn’t supposed to be on the table, but he cuts a fine figure perched there on the corner nonetheless.

Oscar, the black-and-white boy, is far more assertive. He walks back and forth across the keys until I pick him up and cuddle him (exhibit 2). He has an amazing ability to step on the keys in such a way that a computer function that I previously had no knowledge of is suddenly revealed to me. Perhaps his greatest contribution occurred as I was reading through the first-pass edits for my novel, which were in PDF. Not knowing that I could make notes on the PDF, I was writing on a pad of paper when Oscar, rushing to attack the pen, stepped on the keyboard in such a way that a PDF Post-it popped onto the screen, thus cutting my editing time in half.

Lori Ostlund is the author of the story collection The Bigness of the World (to be reissued by Scribner in 2016), which won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the 2009 California Book Award for First Fiction. Her novel, After the Parade, was released by Scribner in September of 2015 and is on the shortlist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and is a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.